Gabriel Medina
President of Makerspace Greenville and Global Print Initiative
I’m the president of Makerspace Greenville and Global Print Initiative. I am a disabled United States Marine Corps Veteran. I am married to a wonderful supportive wife and I have 3 young boys. I grew up in Miami, Florida and in my teenage years I went on 2 short term missions trips with T.I.M.E. International ; one to Costa Rica, another to Russia. I spent my Marine Corps career mostly in Miramar, California as an aviation electronics technician. In 2014 I was deployed to Iraq and spent 7 months as a tower guard.
In May 2012 a sort of inhuman passion has driven me. After hearing about RepRap and the ability of an electronics enthusiast such as myself to build their own 3D printer I was hooked on a mission. I wouldn’t stop until the next year when I had a working 3D printer of my own in my living room made in my backyard. Before then, I’d never been face to face with anything like it. In fact I had nothing to compare it to throughout the entire process.
I caught a bug. I wanted to do it again. Since I was broke there was no way I could afford to build another without selling the one I had.
“How do I make the next one better?”… “How can I share what I learned?”… “How can I learn MORE?”… “What else can I print?”
The problems I came across I wouldn’t wish on anyone else. But what an awesome experience. I wanted to share what I learned with the world. I wasn’t alone in that thinking. In fact, what I had stumbled upon was a movement of like minded nerds, hobbyists, engineers, and tinkerers that couldn’t keep quiet about this revolutionary manufacturing process. In fact, most referenced a Makerspace that helped them get their start. So I started one. First with family members and neighbors.
August 2014 is when we started Makerspace Greenville. We took a trip to Dallas Makerspace to see how they made it work. At the sight of countless tools placed throughout 20,000 square feet of tech, each of us had dropped jaws and sought out to make Makerspace Greenville pale this comparison.
This was however not the best time to start... funding and support were in short supply in Greenville for the Maker Movement. So I started Global Print Initiative out of Makerspace Greenville. I delivered three printers to India, one to New Jersey, and another to Nigeria. This Initiative is now one of the ways Makerspace Greenville will help others make the world around them.
Gabriel Medina
President
Makerspace Greenville
gabe.medina@makerspacegreenville.org
More times than not, just by making the technology available, the truly inspirational innovation will come from the most unlikely of places.
